Month: July, 2011

by Scott Smith

Now that the stage has been set and a timeline has been created, here enters the Monsanto official….

When news of a Monsanto senior official’s arrival from Mumbai reached the nearby village of Munjala, cotton farmers of the village Karanji, about 140 K.m. from Nagpur, located the Monsanto official and took him to their field where a complete failure of ‘Paras Sudarshan’ Bt cotton seed was shown to him.

When the Monsanto representative failed to admit the lapse, he was severely beaten up by the farmers. It was reported that even a local agriculture officer did not come to his rescue. This, from accounts in daily papers in Vidarbha and the Marathwada region of Maharashtra where more than 4 million hectares under Bt cotton cultivation are reporting the flood of bogus seed supplied local agents of American cotton seed MNC giant Monsanto.

by Scott Smith

A skinny, foot-tall soda maker? That’s a different story. The SodaStream, a device that makes carbonated water and flavored sodas in a flash, has long been popular in Europe. Now, it is hitting it big in the United States, even though its American rollout started only last year. (It’s also popular at Slate:At least half-a-dozen staffers, including me, own one.) So how did a device that meets a desire that few people knew they had become so popular so quickly?